Day 4: I'm breaking up with plastic. We need laundry detergent. I stood staring at the bottles in Target for ten minutes. Walked out with nothing. I couldn't do it. Every piece of plastic that we've ever bought is still... Somewhere... Its going to be hard but I'm going to do it.

I’m including some pictures of me (mostly taken by others), curated for how I remember being experienced in that moment and not for how I looked. I am asking that no one comment on my appearance in any of the photos. Thank you.

Regardless I was able to be in the incredible experience of the place and in connection with the women I traveled with, the people we encountered, none of which required that I meet any kind of beauty standard.

Not to worry about how the photos came out. “Just be ugly today,” was strangely liberating. I honored this with varying degrees of success. Some days the best I achieved was to feel neutral and others I didn’t think about it at all.

I noticed, on the Egypt trip, that I was feeling pink, tired and unlovely. I was tired and jetlagged. I’m 55. It was hot. I had ongoing gastro issues for much of the trip. So yeah, I looked unwell, old, pink and tired. So, I gave myself permission not to worry about how I looked.

And what is all this designed to distract me from? I think that’s easy. It distracts me from the ways I’ve been alienated from my own self, my own body, being, power, from the already deliciously weird, messy perfection that’s already here.

And what impossible, moving target of a standard am I being teased to achieve through spending endless dollars and time, relentlessly making myself smaller, paler, until I am a transparent, paper-thin imaginary, non-existent, powerless woman?

It’s a relentless pressure that I’ve felt out of alignment with all of my life. What feels true right now is that this is all bullshit. Because who decides what the criteria are, what counts in that monetary system, who does it include and therefore exclude?

Day 3: I’ve been thinking about prettiness as currency. As I age, there’s an awareness that there’s a shelf life to beauty that’s tied to youth, which, may have afforded me a seat at some tables, a kind of visibility, protection (a lie), advantages, approval.

We wrapped up with a couple of days to rest and recover at a private guest house in Giza. Walled, quiet, little rooms with big tubs to ourselves. All the food grown onsite. Natural water pool, meditation and yoga room.

We stopped at many locations to go explore monuments along the way. I saw pieces of history I’d been obsessed with since I was a kid. Highlight for me was the Valley of the Kings and the temple complex of Hatshepsut.

A transition day of rest on the north coast at the Mediterranean. Then several days sailing up the Nile on our own very Agatha Christie style boat with private state rooms, marble baths. We had the whole thing to ourselves. Such a tranquil way to travel.

We had a week at Siwa Oasis staying at a private farm, exploring local culture, history, salt flats and pools, an incredible day in the Sahara cruising over dunes at high speed in an ancient Land Cruiser and dinner cooked all day under the sand by torch & starlight.

It was absolutely spectacular. I traveled with a very small group of women (7 for the oasis portion and 6 for the rest) and we had male guides and escorts throughout, in addition to female & male hosts, cooks and leaders of movement and spiritual practices. I felt incredibly safe the entire time.

Some of my cool friends have committed to posting a photo (or so) a day as part of the process of metabolizing their experiences from Egypt. These may be photos and stories from the trip or photos or from the present about how trip learnings are unfolding.